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Building Your Class Website

The
Design Process: Build It

The first step in making your web site is to actually write the programming
code for the web pages. Most web pages are written in a simple computer
language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This is the language you're
going to want to concentrate on at first because it is the easiest of the
languages. As you get more advanced, you will want to learn to write in
multiple languages to increase the interactivity of your site.

Writing in HTML can be accomplished in one of two ways: the easy way and
the hard way. The hard way is learning to code by hand. There are many popular
books available that can help you achieve this. It is extremely useful to
understand HTML, but if you're just looking to make a small site (50 pages
or less), you may want to consider using a graphical web-editor page, which
is the easy way. These programs allow you to design a web page in the same
way you would use a word processing program to create a document.

The most popular graphical web-editors include Microsoft Frontpage, Adobe
GoLive, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Allaire Homesite. It seems as if everyone
has his or her favorite. Each of these programs are powerful in their own
right. The TeAch-nology.com staff seem to agree that Macromedia's Dreamweaver
is probably the best product. We base this on ease of use and functionality.

If you want make an appealing web site, you may need more than just an
editor to get the job done. You may notice that most sites have a very appealing
visual look and feel to their sites. This is accomplished by using various
programs which manipulate images. The industry standard for graphic design
is Adobe's Photoshop. Photoshop is a very difficult program for new comers,
not to mention it costs about five hundred dollars. Some very useful replacements
that aren't as expensive, but have a good bit of power, include Microsoft's
Photodraw and Macromedia's Fireworks. A great deal of teachers that we work
with find Microsoft's Photodraw pretty ease to use.

The
Design Process: Show It to the World

For some reason a great deal of people seem to think that once you have
made an HTML document, your page is on the web. This is not the case. Think
of it like any other document. You have to print it out for the world see
it! Printing, in the case of the web, involves transferring your HTML document
to a web server. Once it's on the server, if you know the address, you can
access the page online.

You can get web space free, or if you want your own domain name, you can
pay for space on a server. The going rate for the pay services is twenty
dollars for one hundred megabytes of space per month. There are plenty of
free sites that will host your web site for free including:

Once you have acquired web space, all that is left to do is to transfer
the HTML file(s) you made on your computer to the web server that has your
reserved space. Most free services provide you with a method for transferring
files via their web page. Most paid services ask you to use a transfer file
via an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. The best known FTP programs
include Fetch and WS-FTP. Both are free for download. Using these programs,
you can control your computer files and the web server's files at the same
time. You can delete, rename, and transfer files between the two computers.

Free
Services That Can Help You

There are plenty of free services that give you the ability to design and
maintain a web site for your classes. Some of these services are educator-centered
and others are for just about anybody. The best thing about these services
is that they provide you both with a means for making a web page and provide
you with space on an Internet server (so that you can store your pages on
the web and publish it for the world).

As with anything free, there is a catch. In return for the free tools and
web space, these services post advertising on your web site. The advertising
is out of your control. You cannot choose your own domain name. Let's say
you want your web address to be www.thelittleschoolonthehill.com. Free services
will not support this.

You also lose a great deal of creative control because these services use
web layout templates. Your district site will look like the other 40,000
schools on their services. So much for trying to standout and be noticed.

SchoolNotes.com complements school websites by allowing teachers to post
school information on the world-wide-web without worrying about HTML or
FTP because there is no programming required! And best of all, SchoolNotes.com
is a free community service!

Many educators throughout the world have been contacting us. They have
expressed interest in learning how to create a web site that can be used
with their students. In the true spirit of TeAch-nology.com, we now offer
a simple, and most importantly, FREE method that can be used to create your
own personal web site.

Homestead is consistently rated the best site for designing your own web
page, both in ease of use and power. We definitely agree with critics that
this site is easy and powerful. With no web design experience whatsoever,
you could have your site up and running within twenty minutes. This site
also gives you access to free clip art, animated images, and pre-written
java applets that add spunk to your site without taxing your brain.